The Scepter's return

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Your Majesty, the other king wants to see you in the small dining room as soon as you can get there," a guard outside Lanius' chamber told him as soon as he opened the door.

"Does he?" Lanius said around a yawn. The soldier nodded. Lanius yawned again, then asked, "Did he tell you what it was about?"

"No, Your Majesty, but I think you'd better hurry. I've got the feeling it's important," the guard answered.

He knew more than he was letting on. Lanius didn't have to be a genius to figure that out. The king wondered if he ought to press the soldier. In the end, he decided not to. He would find out soon enough from Grus. He wondered what had happened. The other king hadn't summoned him like this in quite a while.

Scratching his head, Lanius went to the room where he usually ate breakfast. Ortalis sat there, sipping on a cup of wine and fidgeting a little. "Oh, hello," Lanius said. "The guard must have gotten his signals crossed. I thought your father would be here."

"What did he say?" Ortalis asked. The silver goblet shook in his hand — not very much, but enough for Lanius to notice. "What exactly did he say?"

Lanius thought back. He prided himself on being able to get things like that straight. "He said the other king wanted to see me in here as soon as possible." That wasn't word for word, but it caught the meaning well enough.

Ortalis nodded and smiled — a surprisingly nervous smile for so early in the day. "Good. He did get it right then," he said. "That's what I told him to tell you, all right."

"What you told him to tell me?" Lanius' wits weren't working as well as he wished they were.

"What I told him to tell you, yes." Ortalis sounded a little more confident this time. Without rising from his stool, he struck a pose. "I'm the new King of Avornis."

"You're what?" No, Lanius wasn't at his best. He didn't laugh in Ortalis' face, but held back only by the tiniest of margins. "What's happened to your father?" That worry was the main thing that made him not show everything he was thinking.

He waited for Ortalis to tell him Grus was desperately ill, or even that he'd died in the night. Grus had seemed in good health the last time Lanius saw him, but the other king wasn't a young man. Such things could happen, and happen all too easily.

But, a certain ferocious glee in his voice, Ortalis answered, "I packed him off to the Maze, that's what."

Now Lanius frankly stared. "You.. sent your father to the Maze?" He couldn't believe it. Grus had overcome every foe in sight, from rebellious Avornan nobles to King Dagipert of Thervingia to the Banished One himself. How could he possibly have fallen to his own son, a far less dangerous opponent?

As soon as Lanius asked himself the question that way, the likely answer became clear. As far as Grus was concerned, would Ortalis have been a visible opponent at all? Grus had always made allowances for his legitimate son, and never taken him very seriously. He had to be regretting that now.

"You'd best believe I did," Ortalis growled. "He had it coming, too. This is my kingdom now, by Olor's beard."

"Yours?" Lanius said. "What about me?"

"What about you? I'll tell you what about you," his brother-in-law answered. "You can be king, too, if you want. You can go on wearing the crown, if you want. Whenever my old man said, 'Frog,' you'd hop. As long as you keep on hopping for me, everything will be fine." He smiled, as though to say he was sure Lanius wouldn't mind an arrangement like that.

Back when Grus first put the crown on his own head, all the power had been in his hands. Lanius had been a figurehead, nothing more. Grus would have gotten rid of him if he could have done it without inflaming people by ending Avornis' ancient dynasty. He hadn't even bothered pretending anything different.

Little by little, though, Lanius had gathered bits and pieces of power into his own hands. Grus' going out on campaign so often hadn't hurt things, not one bit. Grus had needed someone who could run things here in the capital while he was away. To whom else would he have given the job? Ortalis? Ortalis hadn't wanted it. And so it came to Lanius, and more and more came with it.

Had Ortalis ever bothered to notice Lanius really was a king in his own right? It seemed unlikely.

Lanius almost asked him, And what happens if I don't feel like hopping? He almost did, but he didn't. The look on Ortalis' face gave him all the answer he needed. If you don't, I'll hurt you. I'll enjoy hurting you, too. Have you got any idea how much I'll enjoy it?

What Lanius did say was, "I'll work with you the way I worked with your father on one condition."

"Condition?" Ortalis' face had been ugly before. It got uglier now. "What kind of condition? You don't tell me what to do, Lanius. No one tells me what to do now. I've had a bellyful of that from everybody."

"This isn't much," Lanius said, which might have been true and might not have.

"What is it, then?" Suspicion still clotted Ortalis' voice.

"If the Scepter of Mercy accepts you, I will, too," Lanius said. "Your father could use it. So can I. If you can, too, then I know you'll be good for Avornis, and I won't say a word about anything at all." After a moment, inspired, he added, "And the soldiers will want to see that you can wield it, too. They spent a lot of time and a lot of work and a lot of blood bringing it back from the Menteshe country, you know."

Odds were Ortalis knew nothing of the sort. He hadn't wanted to know anything about the Scepter. But he just laughed now. "Is that all you want?" he said. "Sure, I'll do that. Like the Scepter cares who's holding it! Whenever you want, I'll do it, and the soldiers can stare as much as they please. Does that suit you, Your Majesty?" He made a mockery of Lanius' title.

"That suits me fine, Your Majesty." Lanius also mocked his title, but Ortalis never realized it.

Lanius wondered whether he really would, whether he really could, accept Ortalis as King of Avornis if the Scepter of Mercy did. If the Scepter does, what choice have I got? He asked himself. However little he liked it, he didn't see that he had any.

Grus had been through the Maze many times — always on the way to somewhere else. He'd sent people here for good, but he'd never imagined he would come here for good one of these days himself.

The Maze was, when you got right down to it, a dreary place. River turned to swamp turned to mudflat. It was heaven on earth for mosquitoes and gnats and midges. Grus supposed it was also pretty good if you happened to be something like a heron or a turtle or a frog. If you were a man… The Maze was green enough, but most of it was a sickly green, not a vibrant one. Besides being full of biting bugs, the air smelled stagnant.

"You won't get away with this," Grus told his captors as they rowed him along in a small boat.

"Seems to me we already have," the officer in charge of them answered calmly. "As soon as we got you out of the city of Avornis without running into trouble, the game was ours. We'll pack you away in a nice, quiet monastery, and the outside world can start forgetting about you. People get forgotten all the time."

"And suppose I don't feel like becoming a monk?" Grus asked.

The officer — his name was Gygis — only shrugged. "Then we tie something heavy to your hands and feet, we find a place where the water's a little deeper than usual, and we dump you over the side. Our worries are over either way. You figure out what you want."

" Ortalis gave the orders for this?" Grus couldn't believe his son had brought off such a smoothly efficient coup.

"Of course. Who else?" Gygis seemed innocence personified. That made Grus wonder whether he and his fellow officers were the tail or the dog in this plot. Could they use Ortalis for a figurehead? Why not? Grus had used Lanius as one for years. Gygis went on, "So what'll it be? The monastic life or a short one? You'd better make up your mind in a hurry."

No one had told Grus what to do like that since his father died. He noticed Gygis wasn't calling him Your Majesty. In spite of himself, Grus laughed. He'd wondered what he had left to do as king after recovering the Scepter of Mercy. Maybe the answer was nothing all along.

"Well?" Gygis demanded, obviously suspicious of that laugh. "Which way do we do it?"

"With the choice you gave me, being a monk looks better and better all of a sudden," Grus answered. And that was, perhaps, truer than either he or Gygis fully realized.

Ortalis' henchman grinned a crooked grin. "You see? You're not a fool after all."

Oh, yes, I am, Grus thought. Lanius wrote Ortalis was keeping dangerous company. Hirundo came and warned him about his son. Everyone saw trouble coming except him. And everyone was right, too. I always was too soft on Ortalis.

"Plenty of people before you have made the same choice. Nothing to be ashamed about," Gygis said, trying to be soothing. "Why, when you get to the monastery, you'll probably run into people you know."

People you sent away, he meant. "Oh, joy," Grus said in distinctly hollow tones.

Not many people lived in the Maze of their own accord. There were some fishermen, some trappers, a few men who gathered herbs and sold them to healers and wizards, and a few more who did a variety of things they tried to keep dark from Avornis' tax collectors. Every so often, as Grus' boat made its way through those tricky channels, someone would watch for a while from a boat of his own or from a hummock of ground slightly higher and drier than most.

A couple of the larger hummocks boasted real villages.

Grus' boat gave those a wide berth. Monasteries sprouted like toadstools on smaller patches of more or less dry ground. Some of them were for people who wanted to get away from the world and contemplate the gods at their leisure. Others — more — were for people put away from the world and invited to contemplate the gods instead of being executed and finding out about them with no need for contemplation.

Grus' captors took him toward a monastery of the latter sort. The structure seemed more like a fortress than anything else. Its outer walls looked at least as formidable as the ones Grus had faced at Yozgat. But these works were designed to hold people in, not out.

Gygis cupped his hands in front of his mouth and hallooed when the boat approached those frowning walls. One of the men atop them shouted back. "We've got a new friend for you!" Gygis yelled.

"Who's Grus angry at now?" came the reply.

Gygis laughed. Sitting there beside him, Grus didn't think it was so funny. "You'll see when we bring him in," Gygis said.

A rickety little jetty stuck out into the stream. One of Gygis' men tied up the boat. He looked at Grus and jerked a thumb toward the monastery. "Out you go."

Out Grus went. After sitting in the cramped boat for a couple of days, his legs had a low opinion of walking, but he managed. Gygis and his men made sure Grus went nowhere but toward the monastery.

He and they had to wait outside while a stout portcullis groaned up. Were those monks turning the windlass that raised the chains attached to the portcullis? Who else would they be?

A plump man in a shapeless brown wool robe met the newcomers just inside the portcullis. "Well, well," he said. "Who have we here?"

"Abbot Pipilo, let me present your newest holy man," Gygis said with a broad, insincere smile. "His name is Grus."

"Grus?" Pipilo stared first at Gygis, then at the suddenly overthrown king. "Olor's beard, it is Grus! How did Lanius manage that?"

In spite of himself, Grus started to laugh. Even in the gloom of the fortified gateway, he could see Gygis turn red. The officer said, "King Ortalis now holds the throne with King Lanius. You would be well advised to remember it. He is my master, and I serve him gladly."

"Until something happens to him, or until you see a better deal for yourself," Grus said. "That's how you served me."

"King… Ortalis?" Pipilo said. "Well, well! Isn't that interesting?" He gathered himself, then nodded to Grus. "Come in, come in. You're safe here, anyhow."

"Huzzah," Grus said.

Pipilo laughed. "It may not be everything you hoped for, but you'll agree, I think, it's better than a lot of the things that could have happened to you with your son taking the throne." Since Grus couldn't argue with that, he kept quiet. Pipilo went on, "Forgive me for saying this, but I think I ought to remind you that here you'll just be another monk. If this little domain has a sovereign, I am he."

He didn't sound as though he was rubbing Grus' nose in that — only reminding him, as he'd said. And Grus did need reminding. His word had literally been law for years. Having someone else tell him what to do would be.. different.

"I hear what you're saying," he answered carefully.

That made the abbot laugh again. "By which you mean you don't want to believe it. Well, nobody can blame you for that. You just got here, and you didn't want to come. But you are here, and I have to tell you you're unlikely to leave, and so you should try to make the best of it."

How could anyone make the best of this? Grus wondered. He kept that to himself for fear of insulting Pipilo. The abbot beckoned him forward. Grus followed Pipilo into the monastery. Gygis and his henchmen must have gone back to their boat, for the portcullis creaked down again. With it in place, Grus was trapped here, but he felt no more imprisoned than he had with the iron gate still up.

"First thing we'll do is get you a robe, Brother Grus," Pipilo said. "You'll feel more at ease when you look like everybody else. It will be warmer than that nightshirt, too. You were taken by surprise, I gather?"

"Oh, you might say so." Grus' voice was as dry as he could make it. Pipilo chuckled appreciatively. "How did you become a monk?" Grus asked him, meaning, I don't remember sending you here.

"As a matter of fact, I've been here since the very end of King Mergus' days," Pipilo replied, understanding what he hadn't said as well as what he had. "I was a young man then, but he thought I had too much ambition. I dare say he was right, or I wouldn't have risen to become abbot, would I?"

One ambition he evidently didn't have was escape. Even if he had had it, it wouldn't have done him much good, so he was just as well off without it. A vegetable garden filled much of the monastery's large courtyard. Some of the monks weeding and pruning there looked up from their labors to stare at Grus. They wore brown robes with hoods like Pipilo's. Grus would have felt as out of place here in his royal regalia as he did in his nightshirt.

Wearing that nightshirt didn't keep him from being recognized. A man of about his own age with a wild gray beard came up to him and wagged a finger in his face. "See how it feels, Your Majesty? Do you see?"

"That will be enough of that, Brother Petrosus," Pipilo said. "You did not care to have people revile you when you first joined us here. Kindly extend Brother Grus the same courtesy you wanted for yourself."

Grus' former treasury minister didn't care to listen. "Is Ortalis king now?" he demanded of Grus, who couldn't help nodding. Petrosus chortled. "Then I'll get out! I know I will! Limosa will see to it."

Would Ortalis listen to Petrosus' daughter about this? He might, certainly, but Grus had his doubts. And he didn't want Petrosus to think he could get away with anything. He said, "Listen, my former friend, if Ortalis will send his own father into exile, why would he care even a copper's worth about his father-in-law?"

Petrosus scowled at him. "Because I wouldn't tell him what to do every minute of the day and night."

"No?" Grus laughed, not pleasantly. "Do you know how many scars he's put on your daughter's back?" He didn't tell Petrosus that Limosa had enjoyed getting her welts. Maybe

Petrosus already knew about his daughter's tastes. If he didn't… Grus was aiming to hurt him, but that went too far.

"And that will be enough of that from you also, Brother Grus," Pipilo said with the air of a man who had the authority to give such orders. "Brother Petrosus, kindly return to your gardening." Petrosus went, though his face was crimson and he ground his teeth in fury. That he went proved to Grus what a power Pipilo was here.

The abbot led the king to a storeroom where, as promised, a monk issued him a brown robe and a pair of stout sandals. The robe was as comfortable as anything he'd worn. The sandals would need breaking in.

A bell rang. "That is the call to midmorning prayer," Pipilo said. "We gather together at daybreak, midmorning, noon, midafternoon, and sunset. Come along, Brother. You are one of us now, and this is required of you."

"Is there any way I can get out of it?" asked Grus, who had trouble imagining the gods in the heavens paying much attention to prayer.

"It is required," Pipilo repeated. "Anyone who does not conform to the rule here will find his stay much less pleasant than it might be otherwise."

With that not so veiled threat ringing in his ears, Grus followed Pipilo to the chapel. Monks streamed in from all over the monastery. It held more of them than Grus had expected. He was relieved to see they weren't all men he'd sent into exile here. That would have made his stay even less pleasant than it was liable to be otherwise. All he could do now was try to make the best of things.

"Welcome, brethren, welcome," Pipilo said from the pulpit. "A new brother has joined us today, as some of you will already know. Please welcome Brother Grus to our ranks."

"Welcome, Brother Grus!" the other monks chorused. Some of them actually sounded as though they meant it. Others stared at him with the same vindictive relish Petrosus had shown. He could read their faces with no trouble at all. Here is the man who put me here, and now he's here himself, they were thinking. Let's see how he likes it!

Whatever they were thinking, they got no chance to say it to Grus' face. Abbot Pipilo led them in prayers and hymns to King Olor and Queen Quelea. Grus knew the prayers and the words to the hymns. Coming out with them was easier than staying silent. He didn't think they would do any harm. On the other hand, he didn't think they would do any good, either.

When the prayers ended, the monks went back to their labors. Grus looked around, wondering what to do next. Pipilo came up to him. "This way, Brother, if you please," he said. Shrugging, Grus followed.

Pipilo took him to the kitchens. They were almost as large as the ones for the royal palace. The abbot introduced Grus to Brother Neophron, the chief cook. "Have you had any practice working with food?" Neophron asked.

"Not for a good many years," Grus answered.

Neophron's sigh made several chins wobble. Like most cooks who were good at their job, he was a hefty man. "Well, why don't you start off peeling turnips and chopping them up?" he said. "You can't do much harm there."

Several baskets of white-and-purple turnips stood on a counter. With another shrug, Grus got to work. From the Scepter of Mercy to this, he thought. Thank you, Ortalis. After a while, though, he found he minded the work less than he'd expected. It wasn't exciting, but it struck him as worthwhile. He was helping to feed people, himself among them. How could that be bad?

After half an hour or so, Neophron casually strolled over to see how he was doing. The chief cook nodded, which also made the flesh under his jaw shake. "I've seen neater work," he said, "but that comes with doing it. You're willing enough, by Olor's beard."

Grus got a break for noontime prayers and then for the midday meal. It was quite plain: bread and cheese and beer. But there was enough of it. The monks ate at long tables in a large dining hall. Grus recognized fewer men than he'd expected. Not recognizing them, and not being recognized by them, came as something of a relief.

After lunch, Grus went back to the kitchens. He cut up more turnips, which went into great pots of stew for supper. He washed dishes. He chopped firewood. Along with the turnips, the stew had barley and onions and peas and beans and, for flavor, a little sausage finely chopped. A cook who served it in the palace would have been on the street the next minute. For soldiers in the field, though, it would have done fine. It filled Grus up.

The cell to which Pipilo led him after sunset prayers was just that. It was barely big enough to turn around in. The latrine was down the corridor. His nose would have told him which way if Pipilo hadn't. The bed was a straw-stuffed pallet on a ledge at the back of the cell. The wool blanket was rough and scratchy, but it was thick.

Grus lay down. The only light came from a distant torch. The straw rustled under him. He'd slept very little the night before in the boat with Gygis. He'd worked hard since coming to the monastery. He yawned. He could have lain there brooding and plotting. He fell asleep instead.

Sosia was furious, and didn't even try to hide it. "He can't do this!" she snarled at Lanius in the near-privacy of their bedchamber. "He can't! You're not going to let him get away with it, are you?"

"Well, as long as the soldiers do what he tells them to, and as long as the people here don't start throwing rocks at him whenever he sticks his nose outside the palace, I'm not sure what I can do," Lanius said reasonably. "How long that will be, I don't know. Not too long, I hope."

"I'll throw a rock at him if he sticks his nose anywhere near me!" Sosia said. "My own brother! My brother did that! My brother did it to my father! Some fine family we turned out to be, isn't it?"

Lanius aimed to go on looking at the bright side of things as long as he could. "He sent your father to the Maze," he said. "He didn't do anything more than that, and I suppose he could have. He hasn't done anything to either one of us, and he hasn't done anything to the children."

His wife's hands automatically went to her belly, as though to protect the new life growing there. "He'd better not! He'll be sorry if he tries!"

"Well, he hasn't, and he could have done that, too," Lanius said. "If he hasn't, it probably means he doesn't want to."

"He'd better not," Sosia repeated darkly. "King Ortalis!" Her laughter had a hysterical edge. "Olor's beard, Lanius, he hasn't got any more business running this kingdom than one of your moncats does."

He has less business running the kingdom than Pouncer does, I think. Pouncer was able to pick up the Scepter of Mercy. Can Ortalis? Lanius kept that to himself. It wasn't that he didn't want Sosia to know about his doubts. They might have helped set her mind at ease. But she might have let her brother know about them. Lanius didn't want Ortalis having any idea that he had doubts. He wanted his brother-in-law confident that he could handle the Scepter.

If Ortalis wasn't confident, if he thought something might go wrong, or if he thought Sosia thought Lanius thought something might go wrong, he'd invent some excuse not to try to take it in his hands. He might be able to get away with that, too, at least for a while.

What if he stands in front of the Scepter of Mercy, sets his hand on it — and up it comes? That was Lanius'… oh, not quite nightmare, but worry. If the Scepter judged Ortalis worthy of being King of Avornis, Lanius knew he would have to do the same, as he'd said he would.

And then his long, slow, patient, often painful task would have to start all over again. He'd needed years to win back even a fraction of the kingship from Grus. Would he have to begin anew with Ortalis, who would probably be even more suspicious of him than Grus had been? Could he steal out of the shadows an inch at a time again?

Grus in the Maze! Grus in a monastery! Lanius tried to imagine that, but the picture didn't want to form in his mind. Grus was made for giving orders. If he was suddenly made into a monk, he'd have to take them instead. How would he like that? Would he be able to do it at all? Lanius had a hard time believing it.

He wondered if he ought to tell Ortalis about How to Be a King. He shrugged. If the Scepter accepts him, maybe I will. Ortalis could use a book about how to rule Avornis. Lanius thought Sosia was right — her brother had no idea on his own. But would he care to look at it, or would he only laugh?

Ortalis, from what Lanius had seen, got few ideas of any kind on his own. The ones he did have often involved hurting people or beasts. How had he pulled off such a neat, smooth usurpation? It was almost as though he'd had someone else, someone competent, whispering in his ear all the way through it.

"Your Majesty," the Voice whispered. King Ortalis had liked hearing that from his subjects the past few days. He liked just about everything about being king — he'd especially liked sending his father to the Maze. But most of all, he thought, he liked hearing the Voice acclaim him.

As always, what he saw in these dreams was better than what he saw in real life. The sky was bluer. The sun was brighter. The air smelled sweeter. The land was greener. And, in these dreams, the Voice told him what a wonderful fellow he was. And when the Voice told him something, he had to believe it, because how could a Voice like that lie?

"Your Majesty," it whispered again, caressingly. "You see, Your Majesty? Everything went just the way you hoped it would."

"Yes," Ortalis murmured. "Oh, yes." He wriggled with pleasure. Nothing compared to this, not even taking the lash in his hands.

The voice might have said, Everything went just the way I told you it would. That would have been as true. Without the Voice urging him on, Ortalis never would have had the nerve to move against his father. The price for failure was too high. And he would have failed; he could feel it. He wasn't very able most of the time, and was miserably aware of it. But with the Voice behind him, with the Voice seeing things he missed, he hadn't made a single mistake. And so he was King of Avornis, and his father was… a monk. Good riddance, too!

"Now all I need to do is take care of the stupid Scepter, and then I'll be king for — a long, long time," he said happily. He'd almost said, for the rest of my life, but he didn't want to think about life ending. He wanted to think about doing what he wanted, and about making everybody else do what he wanted.

He wondered which he would enjoy more. Both, he thought, and wriggled again.

"Take care of… the Scepter?" the Voice asked after a longer pause than usual. Maybe Ortalis was imagining things (well, of course Ortalis was imagining things — this was a dream, wasn't it?), but it didn't seem quite as smooth as usual.

"That's right," Ortalis said. "It's nothing, really. I've got to keep Lanius happy, that's all. He can pick up the stinking thing, and my miserable excuse for a father could pick up the stinking thing, so now I'll pick up the stinking thing, too, and then I'll go on doing what I was going to do anyway."

"You — agreed — to this with Lanius?" No, the Voice didn't sound smooth anymore. It didn't sound happy, either. If Ortalis hadn't known better, he would have said it sounded angry and disgusted.

He nodded even so, or his dream-self did. "Sure. Why not?" he said. "One more stupid thing to take care of, that's all."

Suddenly, the sun in his dreamscape wasn't just bright. It was too bright. The sky was still blue — as blue as a bruise. The leaves on the trees remained green — the green of rotting meat. The air smelled of carrion, and carrion birds flew through it — toward Ortalis.

"You fool!" the Voice cried thunderously. "You idiot! You imbecile! You ass! Better to kill Lanius, better to slaughter him, than to play his games!"

"But everybody expects it now," Ortalis protested. Trying to tell the Voice something it didn't want to hear was much tougher than going along with everything it said. He did his best to gather himself. "Don't worry. I can do it."

"Lanius tricked you — that cowardly wretch," the Voice growled. "Better, far better, you should have slain him when you pushed aside your father."

"I don't think so," Ortalis said. "His family's given Avornis kings for a long time. There'd be trouble — big trouble — if I knocked him off. Even my old man never had the nerve to do that."

He made the Voice backtrack. He never understood what a rare achievement that was. "All right," it said grudgingly. " All right. If you must be soft, then I suppose you must. I thought you would have enjoyed the killing, but if not, not. Still, you would have done better to send him to the Maze along with Grus."

"Maybe," Ortalis said, not believing it for a minute. Lanius in the palace could be a puppet, but he was still visibly king. That was how Grus had worked things. Ortalis' father could go to the Maze and stop being king without having too many people pitch a fit. He was only a usurper himself, if a highly successful one. But if Lanius went into exile.. Riots didn't come to the city of Avornis very often. Ortalis wasn't sure enough soldiers would go on backing him to keep him safe if people rioted for Lanius.

The Voice sighed a heavy sigh. The dream-landscape around Ortalis came back toward what it had been — but not quite far enough back. Nor was the Voice back to its usual smooth self when it said, "I suppose we shall just have to hope for the best — but oh, what a feckless fool you are!"

Ortalis woke with a start, with his eyes staring, with his heart pounding, with cold sweat all over his body. His father had awakened like that — just like that — a good many times. So had his brother-in-law. Either of them could have told Ortalis exactly why he felt the way he did, exactly what — or rather, whom — he'd been confronting. They could have, yes, but he'd sent the one away and estranged the other. He had to try to figure things out on his own — but he, unlike Lanius, had never been much good at figuring things out.

Limosa stirred beside him. "What's the matter?" she asked muzzily.

"It's nothing. Go back to sleep. Sorry I bothered you," Ortalis answered. "I–I had a bad dream, that's all."

That wasn't all, and he knew it. What he didn't know was how many times his father had told his mother the same things, and how many times his brother-in-law had told his sister. He didn't know they'd been lying each and every time, either. He did know, and know full well, he was lying now.

"Poor dear,'' Limosa muttered, then started to snore again.

Ortalis lay awake a long, long time. Eventually, though, he fell asleep once more, too — a small miracle, though he also did not know that. What he did know when he woke was that the world around him looked better than it had for some time. He had a less highly colored memory now of the country of his dreams.

He drank several cups of wine with breakfast — to fortify myself he thought. Limosa beamed at him. He looked away. He didn't feel like being beamed at, not this morning. After he lifted the Scepter of Mercy, after he held it in his hand, after he showed Lanius and his father (though his father wouldn't be there to see it)… And after I show the Voice, he thought. The Voice, after all, had found him imperfectly wonderful. Therefore he found it imperfectly wonderful as well, and much in need of showing.

His followers — he would not think, let alone say, such a vulgarism as henchmen — were among the officers gathered around the Scepter. They all looked confident. And here came Lanius. Ortalis wondered if he should have Serinus and Gygis and the rest of his — his followers — pack Lanius off to a monastery after the Scepter was his. Maybe the Voice hadn't had such a bad idea there after all.

"Well," Ortalis said lightly, "let's get it over with." No one else even smiled. Other people were much more serious about this… this folderol than he was. It was all foolishness and a waste of time. Ortalis knew that. If his somber subjects didn't, he'd show them by

…

He set his right hand on the Scepter of Mercy. It felt like ordinary metal under his hand — cool and hard, but warming rapidly to his touch. He lifted — or rather, he tried to lift. The Scepter might have held the weight of the world. Ortalis tried to lift again — and, grunting with effort, failed again. Strain as he would, the Scepter of Mercy refused to budge.

"It will not accept him," an officer — one of his men — said, even as he strained. All the guardsmen, even Serinus and Gygis, turned to Lanius and bowed very low. "Your Majesty!" they chorused.